> It seems that much like Aider, you use separate models for creating code edits and validating them.
That's right. To apply edits, Plandex first attempts a deterministic edit based on the edit snippet. In some cases this can be used without validation, and in others a validation step is needed. A "race" is then orchestrated with o3-mini between an aider-style diff edit, a whole file build, and (on the cloud service) a specialized model. I actually wrote a comment about how this works (while maintaining efficiency/cost-effectiveness) a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43673412
And on the Docker question, it should be working well on Mac.
What are the main differences from aider?
A few differences:
- Plandex is more agentic—it can complete a complex task, updating many files, all in one go.
- Changes are applied to a sandbox by default rather than directly to project files, helping you prevent unintended changes.
- Plandex can automatically find the context it needs in the project.
- Plandex can execute commands (like installing dependencies, running tests, etc.) and auto-debug if they fail.
- Plandex should be more reliable on file edits—it uses an enhanced version of aider's diff-style edit that is resilient to multiple occurrences, but it also has validation, a whole file fallback, and on the cloud service, a custom fast apply model is also added to the mix. Will be publishing benchmarks on this soon.